these timeless spaces
by dragondark
Summary: Fifty sentences in response to the challenge at the Livejournal community 1sentence. [Squall & Rinoa]


disclaimer: I do not own rights to the Final Fantasy VIII.  
notes: Written slightly under a year ago for the challenge at the Livejournal community 1sentence to complete fifty, all of which are below. (Since it was a year ago, some of these remain a little rough, though I've edited them recently.) The pairing is (naturally) Squall/Rinoa. Each sentence is a separate piece, though all of them should be stand-alone. Most of them do take place post-game and will have varying quantities of spoilers for its end. In the parentheses are the accompanying themes; the titles are bolded.

* * *

**these timeless spaces**

**-**

**-**

**-**

**at home  
**(1 **–** _comfort_)  
Her fingers glide traceries of old scars in the dark, mapping his skin as if he is something she knows.

-

**and the first time  
**(2 **– **_kiss_)  
Against a balcony, a hand cocked where her bones melt into her throat, she sighs a smile against his cheek; "that wasn't so bad," she says, "was it?"

-

**just a touch  
**(3 – _soft_)  
His hair spills out of her grasp like smoke.

-

**absurd theories  
**(4 – _pain_)  
After the battle he remembers best the way masks slipped from the voice of the sorceress, the bones, as they fought; he thinks it best that she was faceless to the end, but finds himself touching her cheek in the dark, wondering.

-

**practice makes sickness  
**(5 – _potatoes_)  
"Just one," she coaxes; he eyes the mess she has paraded out of the kitchens on a shining plate as if it were an enemy, but accepts a spoon.

-

**silliness**  
(6 – _rain_)  
"Dancing in a storm is not overrated," she tells him indignantly; still, she takes the coat with a (dignified) sneeze; the umbrella blooms over their heads as they begin the walk back to the Garden.

-

**mutual exchange**  
(7 – _chocolate_)  
Several hours of a certain sharpshooter's wide-grinned advice later, he mutters his order to the woman behind a lace-trimmed counter, who bustles out several minutes later with a silver box and a wink; "listened to Irvine, did you?" Rinoa says, concealing an unsteady smile, and hands him an identical box.

-

**these ordinary days**  
(8 – _happiness_)  
On some mornings he feels the shift of her hair against his shoulder, her breath burning on his skin in whispers: "Thank you," she says, "Thank you, thank you," and finds himself smiling, though he doesn't know why.

-

**close**  
(9 – _telephone_)  
"Newly updated," the salesman tells him, "with cameras and projected holograms!" but he knows even before her laugh, bright as flame: there's no one he needs to call.

-

**a romantic**_  
_(10 – _ears_)  
Despite Zell's declarations (often accompanied with other inquiries into his love life), he can see no use for love sonnets after finding one dedicated to a most improbable body part.

-

**in keeping with tradition  
**(11 – _name_)  
"Tempest," she proposes, "or Gale, or Storm," and isn't surprised at each shake of his head, his fingers still uncertain over her belly.

-

**kiss**  
(12 – _sensual_)  
At the corner of a hall; stepping into a door; over the stairs; behind gossiping trees and stars: ultimately wherever they find desire, for nothing more than love.

-

**goodbye, general  
**(13 – _death_)  
She does not speak as the priest rumbles on, only turns her face to his shoulder while he looks mutely at a grave marked with a name that she has cast away -- laid, at last, to rest.

-

**after the awkwardness**  
(14 – _sex_)  
"Find me," she breathes; he does.

-

**old habits**  
(15 – _touch_)  
Lacing fingers, lips buried in his hair: as if she feeds on warmth or knows how his muscles ache with a strange emptiness when distance opens up between them.

-

**as the stars**  
(16 – _weakness_)  
"SeeDs are mercenaries," the instructor had said, "ambitious: we fight only for things that can be calculated in numbers," but even at night he couldn't find the sharp swell that should have marked regret.

-

**what he knows**  
(17 – _tears_)  
Honed swords know nothing but the kill; but he can see in himself only a peculiar hollowness at the thought of tragedy.

-

**the fortuneteller speaks**  
(18 – _speed_)  
The rate at which you love is the rate at which you fall, child, says the old man ominously, but she only smiles: sometimes (she answers, turning from his tent towards other inviting lamps lit in the far evening) falling fast teaches you how to fly.

-

**old memories**  
(19 – _wind_)  
She buys a music box that answers only to the ring at her hand; it plays, in glittering glass notes,something that might have once been for a piano, reaching from one familiar heart to another.

-

**out of the sorceress' memorial**  
(20 – _freedom_)  
Smoke curls from the broken tangles of metal and wire as she grips the fur of his jacket, and he half-speaks against the curve of her hair, whispers, curses, gratitude: love is unselfish, but I'm not – I couldn't let you go.

-

**ever after**  
(21 – _life_)  
After travelling to the moon and back, passing through time to defeat the three-fold sorceress, he finds himself surprised when each new day unfolds.

-

**without caring**  
(22 – _jealousy_)  
He would rather hear silence than Seifer.

-

**measurement**  
(23 – _hands_)  
His dark fingers overlap hers, burned by countries she hasn't seen and scars she hasn't suffered; she could break so easily, he thinks, but the thought passes without understanding, for there is nothing past it.

-

**a simple question**  
(24 – _taste_)  
She answers: like tears, like bread, like home.

-

**knighthood**  
(25 – _devotion_)  
Without vows or words exchanged, he knows: before the mercenary, before the name, he is hers.

-

**fealty to the sorceress**  
(26 – _forever_)  
He promises carefully and recklessly, but she never thinks to doubt him.

-

**border and barrier**  
(27 – _blood_)  
He dreams nightmares of leaving stains over skin, of confusing the sword and the dark: she's all that stands between them but sometimes she too is a danger when _in_ danger and he is alone again.

-

**highly contagious**  
(28 – _sickness_)  
"You'd probably die of starvation waiting for someone to order you to eat it if I didn't," she reproves, fingers sliding over his forehead as she offers a spoon; he only looks at her when she takes up residence in the neighboring cot the following day.

-

**their song**  
(29 – _melody_)  
"We didn't meet in a bar," he points out towards the end of the first verse, to which she makes a face.

-

**a childhood superstition**  
(30 – _star_)  
He tells her one, leaning over the balcony to watch ancient lights in the dark; "but what else is there to wish for?" she asks, and it's true.

-

**away from garden**  
(31 – _home_)  
He recognises nothing of himself in their house by the sea: the lamps throw low, rich shades of darkness over the walls (too dark to read or aim the gunblade); furniture strays like casual footsteps through the rooms (he finds himself tripping over worn and twisting chairs whose purchase he doesn't recall, breezy cotton drapes with folds poised to catch the tip of his boots as he walks in the dark); the sloping ceiling catches him over the head whenever he steps past the threshold; the long, mazy halls are too narrow – but somewhere, past the twining corridors and the secretive lights, she waits, and so he's home.

-

**comparing the two**  
(32 – _confusion_)  
"Seifer," she says, drawing a finger down the quick slant of the scar, "is nothing like you;" as if he is the only line she knows by which to make judgment.

-

**what it means  
**(33 – _fear_)  
Empty images of blood and bleak scattering bones follow in his wake: it is only when he finds that they are hers that he flinches out of the dream with raw eyes and throat.

-

**complements**  
(34 – _lightning/thunder_)  
He is only the drowning and the silver, the storm that moves relentlessly: she is the dance of light and danger that he cannot shield without shattering.

-

**alike**  
(35 – _bonds_)  
It's the same every time they are asked, again and again: are you sure, is this what you want, how can you know, who do you see that you love? – yes and yes and because and each other.

-

**gifts in midwinter**  
(36 – _market_)  
Through gathering drifts of snow she gathers things to pass the hours: new boxing gloves emblazoned with bright symbols, credit on flowers and refined bullets, a season's worth of train tickets, oil to smooth the movements of a chain, and, lastly, a book (_On the Finer Points of Inspirational Speaking, Or: How to Draw Out A Five-Minute Speech Into Fifty Minutes In Order to Assure Your Audience Their Money's Worth_), which she considers with a wry smile before dropping it into the basket.

-

**tragedies invincible**  
(37 – _technology_)  
Of all the wonders that he has seen in their world – cities cloaked by barriers that pass concealed, a sorceress who rings back through time to find an age that seeds her own demise – this is the most terrible that he knows: stone and earth conquering (words wrung from marble, denoting irrelevancies), at last, what he has traversed time and space to claim (but the power passes on).

-

**without understanding**  
(38 – _gift_)  
It should be unnatural, this simplicity of speaking she has which doesn't offend but calls an answering smile – more than the tone, the chastened sweetness – but he, too, is charmed.

-

**heritage**  
(39 – _smile_)  
"Is that really the face you're going to pass onto your kids?" and she makes a gargoyle-frown; his eyes flicker before he coughs, glances away.

-

**knowing this  
**(40 – _innocence_)  
She is all he needs.

-

**beyond faith  
**(41 – completion)  
Too fragile to fit against him, too slim to hold, but it passes because she is the only surety he has.

-

**simple pleasures**  
(42 – _clouds_)  
"I thought it was fun," she confesses with a slanting glance after the screen yields back clear skies to Ragnarok; "can't we ride through another cloudbank again, just once?"

-

**everything belongs**_  
_(43 – _sky_)  
We should go flying, she suggested in a drowsy afternoon – why, because they could.

-

**peace**  
(44 – _heaven_)  
He does not count it as happiness, this intangible calm cast over his world: all he knows is that she is source and key, and he will not lose her.

-

**an impossibility**  
(45 – _hell_)  
From a dream world where she has never drawn breath, he wakes out of disbelief.

-

**their designated places**  
(46 – _sun_)  
He's begun to forget already which of them plays the companion and which the role of bright chimeric things.

-

**examining the sky**  
(47 – _moon_)  
Luminous and inhabited by monsters, swollen with its own peculiar darkness, he can only watch its slow crest across the skies in something remotely less like wariness with her fingers, a light trace, over his arm.

-

**simple memories**  
(48 – _waves_)  
She leaves no footprints that cannot be rinsed from the earth; she doesn't want to be remembered, she tells him, by anyone except himself: like a secret, she says dreamily, power dark beneath her eyes – a secret.

-

**who she is  
**(49 – _hair_)  
At night, turning to her he breathes rosemary (for memory), smoke (sharp as starlight), and something elusive: stinging sweet at his tongue like a word; he holds his breath and waits for the answer to emerge from a corner of his mind or the tumbling spill of her hair.

-

**he realises**  
(50 – _supernova_)  
Love is a revelation, all dazzling inconsistencies like a breaking star, but ultimately unchanged.

* * *

feedback: is always appreciated, beloved, craved, and the rest of the alphabet. Feel free! 


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